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Check Out the Source Code For the Xerox Alto

Posted by samzenpus on from the take-a-look dept.

jfruh writes The Xerox Alto is a computer legend: it was never sold to the public, but its window-based OS was the inspiration for both the original Mac operating system and Windows. Now you can check out its source code, along with code for CP/M, a similarly old school (though not graphical) operating system.

9 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Now we can see by dwywit · · Score: 2, Informative

    where Gates & Jobs got all their ideas from.

    --
    They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
    1. Re:Now we can see by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      it wasn't woz.

      it was bill atkinson.

      http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Still_Remember_Regions.txt&topic=QuickDraw

    2. Re:Now we can see by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Funny

      Gates got his ideas from Genghis Khan.

  2. Dup by gnu-sucks · · Score: 2

    http://news.slashdot.org/story...

    But still seriously cool. Between this, the entire linux kernel, and DOOM, there is a lot of neat code online to analyze.

    Reading code is to coding as reading books is to writing. Essential.

  3. CP/M source code by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In honor of CP/M's 40th birthday, the [PL/M] source code for a very early version from 1975, and three later versions from 1976, 1978 and 1979 are being made available for non-commercial use.

    LOL -- and a bit of Digital Research cluelessness from the past as well.

  4. Re:CP/M needs to buried ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh, get over yourself. CP/M was 1975 for god's sake. In the same time period (and until substantially later), Unix filenames were limited to 14 characters. A diskette held 243 kB. Unix and CP/M didn't hold back anybody, you idiot. They opened the way.

    BTW, people who use spaces in filenames are imbeciles. They don't have a clue how command lines operate. Point and click is about the limit of their brainpower.

    What did YOU give the world in 1975?

  5. Ideas come cheap. by westlake · · Score: 2

    where Gates & Jobs got all their ideas from.

    The revolutionary Alto would have been an expensive personal computer if put on sale commercially. Lead engineer Charles Thacker noted that the first one cost Xerox $12,000. As a product, the price tag might have been $40,000.

    Xerox Alto

    Adjusted for inflation, $62,000 for the 1973 prototype and $207,000 for the commercial product.

  6. Re:CP/M needs to buried ... by tibit · · Score: 2

    Somehow spaces in file names have not been a problem for my command line use on Unix for many years now, and I don't pay much attention to them. Perhaps, just perhaps, whoever grumbles about that doesn't know any better?

    --
    A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
  7. Dealers of Lightning Re:Xerox Alto window-based O by Fubari · · Score: 3, Interesting
    A fun read... http://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/dp/0887309895 excerpt from summary:

    In the bestselling tradition of The Soul of a New Machine, Dealers of Lightning is a fascinating journey of intellectual creation. In the 1970s and '80s, Xerox Corporation brought together a brain-trust of engineering geniuses, a group of computer eccentrics dubbed PARC. This brilliant group created several monumental innovations that triggered a technological revolution, including the first personal computer, the laser printer, and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors of the Internet), only to see these breakthroughs rejected by the corporation. Yet, instead of giving up, these determined inventors turned their ideas into empires that radically altered contemporary life and changed the world.